Prof. Peter Arthur Diamond is a renowned American economist and Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is an accomplished author on public finance, social insurance, uncertainty and search theories, macroeconomics and behavioral economics. As one of the three winners of the 2010 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for “analysis of markets with search frictions.”, Prof. Diamond has made “fundamental contributions to search and matching theory, which offers a framework for studying frictions in real-world transactions and has led to new insights into the workings of markets.”

Prof. Diamond is also known for developing an overlapping generations model (otherwise known as the OLG model or the Diamond model), which has been widely used for analyses of debt and also for analyses of social security systems, and of intergenerational aspects of taxation. His work with James Mirrlees on taxes and government expenditures, production efficiency result, design of shadow prices for government production decisions, optimal income taxation, and the optimal structure of benefit rules in social security systems has produced far-reaching impacts on the world economic development and social security strategies. In addition, Prof. Diamond has done extensive work on pension policy. He has analyzed pension systems in various countries and regions, and advised governments on policy-making decisions relating to pension systems and reform of pension policies. His books on pensions include Saving Social Security: A Balanced Approach (with Peter R. Orszag), Reforming Pensions: Principles and Policy Choices and Pension Reform: A Short Guide (both with Nicholas Barr). He was the recipient of the Award for Outstanding Achievements of the National Academy of Social Insurance (NASI) in 2008 for his remarkable research contributions in social security and government policies.

Prof. Diamond was born in New York, U.S.A. He obtained his Ph.D. from MIT in 1963, when he was only 23 years of age. He’s been working with the MIT since 1966. He is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has been President of the American Economic Association, the Econometric Society, the National Academy of Social Insurance and the Western Economic Association International, and will be President of the Eastern Economics Association.